Abstract: A media signal processor (MSP) architecture is disclosed in this invention To address the shortcomings of conventional high performance processing units, the MSP architecture is designed using a new concept in parallel processing—“Same Instruction Different Operation” (SIDO) and “Same Instruction Multiple Data” (SIMD) architectures. The scalable nature of the architecture makes it possible to add multiple cores to match the processing needs of any type of data processing application. With multiple MSPs working in parallel, multiple data streams can be processed in either parallel or in a sequentially pipelined manner, using a software-based control mechanism.